Borders

On Boris Lojkine's Souleymane's Story

I don’t remember the last time I’ve been in an audience as quiet as the one with which I saw Souleyman’s Story. We were all concentrated intently on the screen, pinned by a mixture of the tension you might expect at a race-against-the-clock thriller and the dread that comes when you want things to turn out right for the character you’ve come to empathize with but suspect they won’t. The director, Boris Lojkine, doesn’t abuse either approach. He’s not out to work you over. And you’re grateful that the movie is both emotionally involving and sharply made because the subject—the forty-eight hours leading up to the interview that will determine whether or not a Guinean immigrant (Abou Sangare) will be able to remain in France—sounds, if we’re being honest, like the type of picture we drag ourselves off to see because it will make us feel virtuous, though we don’t expect any pleasure from it. But Lojkine is alive to the nuances of the all-too typical situation he’s putting on screen and to the sensual and visceral pleasures that make us want to watch a movie in the first place.